Sunday, September 09, 2012

Wow - Not The Greatest Soros Fans

The forum comments for the Spiegel article about Soros' call for Germany to lead or leave are less than favorable to his small request. Most of them make some reference to the fact that he is talking his own book. If you don't read German, you can use Google translate to get the gist of it. The German High Court's decision over the ESM funding is due on the 12th, and it doesn't seem like its decision will be greeted with joy. One must remember that the voters can overrule their representatives in the next election!

There is however some enthusiasm for the idea of leaving the Euro, but wouldn't that produce a northern currency and a southern (bankrupt) currency?

I think the best case is for the northern countries to leave the Euro. The Euro would immediately devalue, which would give the southerners the easing they need. But then the northern lenders would have to realize tremendous losses, so that's not something the elites want to do.

Neil, the scale of the debt overhang in Italy is such that Germany can't take the interest rate hit and save Italy.

It's another Greece. One way or another, that debt has to be written down. Just moving it to Germany would put Germany in a debt bind akin to France. Bundesbank estimates current 2013 Germany debt at over 80% debt-to-GDP ratio. That's with the ESM but no other extensions, I believe.

Since the Germans already have a retirement age of 67 and have already instituted the social reforms in the first half of the 2000s, they really are without any place to make that up. That is the reason the Germans keep insisting that other countries make these reforms. First they are entirely sincere - it worked for them. Second, they simply cannot take on debt that would force them to push their retirement ages to 70 or so while funding better benefits for other countries.